70
The US was able to make smoking cigarettes seem uncool. Compared to a lot of other parts of the world, they seem to have made real progress in cutting tobacco use.
This chart of the rise and fall of cigarette smoking is kind of interesting.
The chart begins in 1900. What happened just before then, to kick off the rise of cigarette smoking? The invention of the rolling machine, in 1880. Machine-rolled cigarettes made tobacco use much more convenient: you didn't have to roll your own, fuss with a pipe, or deal with the mess of chewing tobacco or snuff. When you make consuming a product easier, people consume more.
The fastest increases in cigarette smoking were during WWI and WWII. What happened then? The US military issued cigarettes in rations. Why did they do that? For the same reason the German army issued amphetamines. Nicotine is a stimulant drug; it helps soldiers stay awake on watch and have more energy to fight.
Here's another chart. This one is cancer death rates. Lung cancer deaths track smoking rates, but delayed by 20 years -- the time the cancer takes to develop and spread in the body.
Smoking peaked and began to decline in the 1960s, before the adoption of anti-smoking laws; even before the 1970 ban on smoking ads on television. One possible conclusion is that the legislative changes were not the cause of the smoking decline, but rather part of a broader cultural response to the devastation of American elders by the cancerous effects of smoking.
A friend of mine recently got back from Europe and was talking about how every restaurant had tons of people smoking in it. It's so foreign to me. I remember in the '90s you'd be asked "smoking or non" when going to restaurants. Now there just isn't smoking on restaurants. Even in bars where it is allowed it is pretty minor. Smoking really got cut back a lot.
A major caveat is that vaping is a big problem now. I believe it is marginally (or maybe even substantially) safer than traditional smoking but it's still just peddling a nicotine addiction to youngsters.
A major caveat is that vaping is a big problem now. I believe it is marginally (or maybe even substantially) safer than traditional smoking but it’s still just peddling a nicotine addiction to youngsters.
Vaping nicotine is probably about as harmful to health as chewing nicotine gum; and vastly less harmful than smoking.
It is certainly a way to take an addictive drug. It is also an extremely convenient one, which makes it more likely that people will use it more heavily. (See also the rise in the popularity of cigarette smoking after the invention of the rolling machine: convenience leads to more consumption.)
However, most of the direct health harms of smoking aren't from the nicotine; they're from everything else that comes with it --
- solid smoke particulates
- unburned and partly-burned resins ("tar")
- carbon monoxide
None of these are in the vapor produced by e-cigarettes.
Inhaling smoke is bad for lungs; no matter whether that smoke is from tobacco, another herb, a forest fire, unsafe industrial equipment, a coal-fired power plant, or a fireplace.
Nicotine itself is not carcinogenic, although it does constrict the lung passages which makes it harder for the lung to clean itself. Chronic use of nicotine vapes may be expected to cause some amount of emphysema due to this chronic constriction. But it's not gonna cause the massive amount of lung cancer that smoking does, because it just doesn't contain the high concentrations of carcinogens that cigarette smoke contains.
(I do not use nicotine at all, however I greatly prefer to be around people vaping than around people smoking.)
To be clear, the nicotine part I was talking about is that it is still dirty to get young people addicted to a "drug" (as in an addictive drug).
Oh sure. If an addictive drug isn't also especially harmful to health, it might make sense to treat it more like coffee than like cigarettes. I don't think very many people consider the popularity of coffee and tea to be "a big problem", and so it's not clear to me that vaping should be considered one either.
You make a good point and every talk about drugs and addictions always comes back to alcohol and caffeine. I'd have to look more into it but yeah I think nicotine is mostly like caffeine. I think there are (or were) some gross practices about making it appealing to kids but yeah it's true, Starbucks is appealing to kids too. It feels different. I can't really explain why it does but it does. But yeah, I'll ponder on this. Regardless, I definitely don't see vaping nearly as bad as tobacco. Orders of magnitude less serious of a problem.
They are a step behind. All tobacco execs moved on to making food flavour addictive.
I live in WA state. the state and county response to covid seemed very informed and measured; they based policy on WHO and CDC recommendations, tried to ramp up and ramp down to make it easier, and were transparent with the numbers they were looking at.
We still saw our medical facilities struggling, especially as one of our neighbor states was not particularly great at covid prevention. so when their situation was bad, a lot of them came over here.
when Roe was overturned and abortion bans started going into place, our leaders realized our neighbor was going to once again flood our medical system. so they started stockpiling abortion drugs and doing what they could to increase support.
they're also trying to increase public transit, which I appreciate. it's plagued by corruption and delays, but they are slowly making progress.
WA has a lot going for it in terms of governance. It's also pretty nice that we get to vote by mail.
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Compared to a lot of politics around the world, our local provincial government (BC Canada) is relatively... boring, and I love that so much!
There will always be issues, but for day to day things, the major parties are just doing their jobs. It's boring, and the politics is in good faith for the most part. The focus is on issues and the best way to implement some change, rather than populism.
There are other great things the government has done, but this is what comes to mind first
This actually is a great thing. I hate that politics is so much about screaming at the voters that party X sucks so much. Just do your fucking job.
Federal government (Australia) recently extended our pharmaceutical benefits scheme so that we can get double the amount of medicine for the same price. State government (Queensland) did a huge cost of living rebate for energy bills which has been super helpful.
NY legalized weed the right way.
other than that, not much.
What’s the wrong way?
Bans or heavy restrictions on growing, lack of state protection against work discrimination (cannabis use is now protected class in ny), canna related criminal record expungement, to name a few.
In Britain we prescribed addicts heroin and had around 1,000 users, since we’ve pushed them from the prescription pad to the black market, we’ve over 300,000 problematic users, stealing from shops, selling their bodies in a desperate attempt to fund their criminal addiction and often seen clutching strong cans of lager in a desperate attempt to fight off withdrawals.
We used to be champions of this problem. Now it costs us 21 billion a year.
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Quit.
The government here (Netherlands) failed to make any long term decisions. They didn't even make bad decisions, just none what so ever. After the government fell, all major political figures in the main parties just quit. Time for new blood and for the youngest generations to start making decisions. The oldies won't survive long enough to have to worry about the mess the world is in and the mess will only get worse.
No clue if elections will result in something better, but it'll be interesting to see which direction the voters will be going. I't finally worth it to vote for the youngest eligible voters.
They literally got bored and moved onto different games.
German here and it's been a while.
My parents came back from a vacation in austria recently and told me about what they heard on the radio: The austrian government did two separate things that actually benefit citizens in one day.
They didn't remember something like this happening in germany in the last 20 or so years and neither do I.
German too. I think the government handled that whole covid and Ukraine stuff relatively well. They managed to keep the amount of death very low compared to other countries, while only doing soft lock downs that were no where near what countries like Italy had to do.
Ukraine has nothing to do with our daily life's, but they gave and still give a lot more support that other countries do (except USA).
The 9€ and now 49€ ticket were pretty great decisions.
Healthcare (Indonesia). It's been much better for the past decade. The state owned hospitals has been improved as well.
awkwardly sighs in 'murica
https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/recent-changes.htm
We're still making new national parks. There have been dozens of new parks and historical monuments established this century.
The way to make it perfect would be a national high speed rail network connecting all the major and mid sized cities to all the national parks accessable within the lower 48.
Would basically annihilate fuel emissions for mid-hop travel since going by train is less costly than air travel and competitive against gas costs over similar distances.
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Hey man, NASA, a government agency has done a ton of cool stuff recently. Rovers and a helicopter on Mars, JWST, asteroid sample return, fostering the commercialization of flights to the ISS have dramatically reduced the cost of getting our astronauts to orbit. We do space exploration pretty darn well.
Yeah. When NASA doesn’t let itself become too bureaucratic, they do some damn good science.
There is a former president facing charges in four states. I'm counting that as a plus.
ADA, basically turned the entire country into the curb effect
New Zealand - communicate about the COVID response. Whatever your opinions on the actual response (they did the right thing imho), the way they communicated what they were doing and why was phenomenal.
Which kinda puts into contrast how badly they've fucked up the comms on just about every other important bit of policy
Let me out of jail
It almost broke the IMF!
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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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